Nuclear bomb missing for 66 years may have been found

A replica of the famed missing bomb (Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada)

A deep-sea diver looking for sea cucumbers is believed to have discovered a nuclear bomb that has lay dormant for nearly 70 years off the coast of Canada.

Sean Smyrichinsky was diving in waters near British Columbia last month when he came across a metal object "bigger than a king-size bed", he told the BBC.

After returning to the surface, he described it as "really weird" to his fellow divers and said it might be a UFO.

After speaking to a friend on the mainland about what he had found, Mr Smyrichinsky realised it might be the missing nuke - and now the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) is looking into it.

The mystery started during the Cold War. Despite wreckage of the US B-36 plane carrying the nuke being found hundreds of kilometres inland, no trace of the bomb was ever found.

A spokesperson for the DND said they had high hopes the object is indeed the missing bomb - but aviation historian Dirk Septer said there was no chance, as the diver's location was completely wrong.

"It could be anything - whatever he found, it's not the nuke," Mr Septer told the BBC.

If it is actually the missing bomb, the US government says it shouldn't actually contain active nuclear material.